Behold the Dreamers: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Neni goes to a café across from the public library in midtown Manhattan to meet her instructor, who tells her to call him Jerry. They’ve met at this same place twice already. This time, she brings along Liomi and introduces them. Jerry mistakenly calls Liomi “Lomein” and Liomi smiles. Neni prods him to respond to Jerry’s niceties. She then asks Jerry if he has children. Jerry says he doesn’t but wishes that he did. Neni jokingly offers that he can borrow Liomi. Jerry says that he’d take him, but that Neni shouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t give him back.

This meeting is more comfortable than Neni’s first with Jerry. She spent the whole hour just nodding while he spoke, afraid of asking a silly question. By the second meeting, she’d pushed herself to ask questions, believing it was pointless to travel all the way downtown if she couldn’t take full advantage of Jerry’s offer of private tutoring. By this third meeting, she and Jerry are chatting about his background. She learns that his father was in the military and that he’s “lived in many parts of America and Europe.” She then tells him about her life in Cameroon and having never traveled more than forty miles outside of Limbe before coming to the U.S. Jerry expresses curiosity in her dream of becoming a pharmacist, but Fatou arrives at the café early with her two children, putting an end to their conversation.

Fatou tells Jerry all about her and Neni’s plans for Mother’s Day, which reminds Jerry to call his mother. Fatou reminds him to do something nice for his wife, too. Jerry says that he isn’t married, but that he has a boyfriend. Neni and Fatou are shocked, much to Jerry’s amusement. Fatou says that she knew no gay men in Cameroon, though there was a man in her village who, she says, walked like a woman and who everyone said must’ve been a woman inside. No one called him gay, though, because he had a wife and children. She also says that there’s no word in their language to describe homosexuals.

Neni timidly asks Jerry how he can like children if he’s gay. Jerry says that, once he’s done with school, he and his boyfriend plan to adopt. Fatou jokes that he should take one of her children—she’s got seven! Neni asks how many Jerry wants. He says that he’d like to have one or two kids.

When Neni leaves her meeting with Jerry, she still registers her surprise to Fatou about him being gay. Fatou says that Neni’s surprised because she’s attracted to Jerry; Neni denies this. Fatou then asks why she didn’t tell Jende that she’s been meeting her teacher at a café. Neni says that she just didn’t want Jende to worry about his wife being on “a rendezvous on a Sunday afternoon with a young professor.” Fatou asks what’ll happen if Liomi tells him. She relates an anecdote about her cousin who did just what Neni did—that is, tell her husband that she’d be in one place, and then he passed somewhere different and saw her drinking a beer with another man. He dragged her back to their house and beat her. Neni asked what her cousin did about it. Fatou said that she simply learned her “lesson,” and the marriage continued.